This sea, which Lenore had never looked on till she came a bride to Crépuscule, held for her a deep fascination. She watched it as an astronomer watches his stars. And its vasty, changing surface came to exercise a peculiar influence over her quiet life. The night of the great storm brought it into double conjunction with the bitterest grief in her life; and, with the knowledge of its cruel power, awe was added to her interest and her admiration. She and Alixe were accustomed to talk daily of the lost Lenore, Lenore herself always introducing the topic with irresistible eagerness, and Alixe answering her innumerable questions with an interest born of curiosity regarding the young widow’s motive. In the presence of Alixe, Lenore never betrayed the tiniest tremor of sensitiveness; and it would have been impossible for Alixe to surmise how keen was the secret bitterness that lay hidden in her heart. What suffering it brought she endured alone, by night, and indeed she kept herself for the most part well shielded from it. From the first night after Gerault’s burial, Lenore had insisted upon sleeping alone. To every suggestion of company she replied that solitude was precious to her, and that she could not sleep with another in the room. Eleanore understood her feeling, and, while she left an easy access from her room to Lenore’s, never once ventured to enter Lenore’s chamber after nightfall. For this, indeed, the young woman was grateful, not because of any joy she found in being alone in the darkness, but because, after she had gone to bed, she felt that her veil of appearances had fallen, and that she might let her mind take what temper it would. It was by night that she knew the terrible yearning for the dead that all women have in time, and from which they suffer keenest agony. It was by night that she pictured Gerault not as he had been, but as she had wished him to be toward her; and gradually Gerault dead came to be vested with every perfect quality, till her loss became endurable to her through the hours of her dreaming. By night, also, her childhood returned to her; and she recalled and gently regretted all the simple pleasures she had known, the rides and games and caroles that she had been wont to indulge in, in her father’s house. Sometimes, too, in hours of distorted vision, she came to feel that her great blessing was rather a burden; and she would weep at the thought of the little thing that must be born to the interminable shadows of this grim Castle, and felt that she alone would be responsible for the sadness of the young life. Yet there might be fair things devised for him. It could not be but a boy,—her child; and in his early youth she planned that he should ride to some distant, gay chateau, to be esquired to a gallant knight; and in time he should come riding home to her, himself golden-spurred; and then, later, he should bring a lady to the Castle whom he should love as